Tim Marr, Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Liverpool

1 Introduction

The present paper attempts to open out somewhat the scope of the "state-planning-versus-
rassroots-initiatives" view of language maintenance. It considers the ongoing
Peruvian project of status and corpus planning being carried out by an
institution, the Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua, which has a highly
ambivalent attitude towards both the nation-state which it claims to serve
and the speakers whose aspirations it claims to represent. The paper examines
the perspectives and ideology of the Academia principally through a commentary
on an interview with its President, Dr Juvenal Pacheco Farfán, carried
out on 7 August 1996 as part of my doctoral research on Peruvian language
shift. The interview took place in Pacheco's office at the Universidad
San Antonio Abad in Cusco, where he is head of the Departamento de Ciencias
de Comunicación.

The discourse of the Academia lies squarely within a tradition that
has existed in Cusco since at least the 17th century, whereby self-aggrandising
local élites have sought to portray themselves as the legitimate
heirs of the Incas, in part through the appropriation of the supposed language
of the Incas (Itier 1992a, Godenzzi 1992, Niño-Murcia 1997). Traditionally,
such groups - composed invariably of bilingual mestizos - have claimed
that their own Quechua sociolect preserves the "purity" and "nobility"
of the Inca tongue. Members of the Academia like to refer to the language
as "quechua imperial" (see e.g. Manya 1992); or as qhapaq simi or
apu simi (that is, as something like "language of the nobles" or
"language of the lords") in an unambiguous attempt to differentiate it
from runa simi - "people's language", the term by which the Quechua
language is most often known by runa, the monolingual peasants of
the Andean sierra.

The Academia positions itself in public as a doughty defender and protector
of the Quechua language, the voice of the "authentic" language as opposed
to the linguists and educationalists it regards as outsiders or "foráneos"
(Itier 1992b). As holder of the state franchise, as it were, for the Quechua
language, it sees the revitalisation of Quechua as its sacred task, and
campaigns tirelessly for the teaching of Quechua in schools. It is not
intended in this short paper to attempt to quantify either the extent of
commitment of the Peruvian state to language maintenance, or the efficacy
of grass roots movements towards the same goal. It will however be argued
that, given the peculiar linguistic, social and political agenda of the
Academia as espoused by Dr Pacheco, a serious language maintenance project
on the part of either state or grass roots activists would find in the
Academia at best an unreliable ally and at worst an implacable enemy.

2 Language and legitimate authority

The Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua in its present form was constituted
by congressional decree in 1990 out of the former Academia Peruana de la
Lengua Quechua. It has regional branches in the major Quechua-speaking
Departments of Peru, and in the capital, but is based in Cusco. The current
state of "authority" in the world of the Academies is muddled and strife-ridden.
Pacheco confided to me that he was to travel to Lima the following month
in order to convene an extraordinary meeting of all the regional branches
of the Academia, at which he would attempt to reimpose central control
from Cusco. The immediate justification for this appeared to be that the
Lima branch of the organisation (or certain members of it, perhaps) had
taken to styling themselves in public "Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua
del Perú", hence implicitly disavowing the authority and pre-eminence
of the Cusco centre. The acute concern for name and style is reflected
in many of Pacheco's comments during the interview; it was further emphasised
after the interview had finished, when Pacheco insisted that I take out
my notebook and copy down his full style, word-for-word, at his dictation.
Taking my notebook from my hands, he then checked the result for accuracy.
It reads:

Dr Juvenal Pacheco Farfán

Presidente de la Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua

Sede Central: Qosqo - Perú.

At one point in the interview Dr Pacheco himself got the name of his
institution wrong, thus inadvertently appearing to legitimise a "rogue"
competitor. His repeated self-correction is rather revealing:

This insistence on the display and recognition of duly-sanctioned authority
is not an idiosyncrasy peculiar to Pacheco: it is readily apparent in the
publications and other public discourse of the Academia. Pacheco's colleague
Dr David Samanez Flórez similarly invokes legal authority in his
attempt to enshrine the practice of pentavocalismo(1):

It should already be clear that the motives and discourse of the Academia
go beyond the purely linguistic. The problem of the proliferation of competing
self-appointed authorities on Quechua, added to the ideological imperative
- mentioned above, and to be discussed further below - of promoting a particular
sociolect, leads the Academia, through its spokespeople, to adopt a quite
distinctive mode of discourse, in which for example questions formulated
primarily in terms of language are brushed away with answers couched
in terms of authority to pronounce on language.

A lengthy exposition followed on the professional and personal eminence
of the miembros de número (committee members) of the Academia.
In seeking to understand the import (at times, it seems, only at the level
of a semi-conscious subtext) of what Pacheco has to say, it is necessary
to appreciate that his linguistic worldview is shaped by his conception
of power and authority: all tends towards the justification of the proposition
that he and his fellow Academicians are uniquely able to pronounce upon
Quechua, upon Cusco, upon the Andean region, upon the Republic as a whole,
and even beyond. Itier's (1992b) critique of the institution concludes
that its activities are designed ultimately to demonstrate that "...el
Cusco, su clase media y sus intelectuales están legítimamente
llamados a representar la supuesta cultura andina y, por ende, la nación"
(1992b:90). That this is substantially correct -understated, even - will
become apparent in due course.

3 Cuscocentrismo and the cult of the Incas

As Itier's comment implies, the Academia's attitude to language is conditioned
by a heavily ideologised worldview which is essentially Cusco-centric (that
is, determinedly regionalist), and, within this, class-based. However,
the Academicians' claim to linguistic, social and political pre-eminence
depends upon the generalised recognition that, firstly, the Inca past represents
the moral and cultural heart of Peru; and secondly, that control - in both
the linguistic and political senses - of the qhapaq simi affords
them an indisputable claim to the heritage of the Incas. For this self-selecting
economic and cultural mestizo élite, then it is - must be
- axiomatic that Quechua originated in Cusco under the incanato.
Juan Antonio Manya, cusqueño priest and predecessor of Pacheco
as president of the Academia, writes:

And so on for several paragraphs in the same vein. The identification
of the language with the city is absolute, as is the identification of
the city with the Incas, and with the heart of the modern nation. Of course,
the notion that the history of Cusco is "cubierta con el denso velo del
misterio" owes more to wilful obfuscation (or, to be kind, wishful thinking)
than reality. The discourse of the Academia relies heavily on romanticism
and mysticism to make its case; the well-established complex of modern
historico-linguistic research showing the coastal origins of Quechua (see
e.g. Torero 1974, Cerrón-Palomino 1987) tends to be ignored or dismissed
out of hand. The determined propagation of the cult of the Incas also seems
to necessitate ablind disregard for any other Peruvianor
South American culture. At no point in the interview under discussion
did Pacheco refer to any pre-Inca civilization in Peru; the history of
the country is understood to begin (and, virtually, to end) with the Inca
empire.(2) In both space and time, Pacheco's
vision of America at the time of the Conquest is an extraordinarily limited
one:

One might of course wish to take issue with the numbers quoted: and
indeed, elsewhere Pacheco in fact cites this same figure of 200 million
dead for the whole continent of America (Pacheco 1994:9). It is
striking that, speaking here, his definition of "nuevo mundo" contrives
to ignore entirely most of the continent, which is dismissed with an "etcétera
etcétera": America is presented as virtually synonymous with the
limits of the Inca empire. The same selective vision of culture is projected
into the present. If the true culture of Peru is self-evidently an Andean
Quechua one, and Quechua-speaking (or, rather, bilingual) Cusco self-evidently
the very essence of it, then any Peruvian who is less than fervently interested
in Quechua is simply suffering from cultural dislocation:

Note "su cultura... su mundo andino"; every Peruvian,
from wherever in the country, speaking whatever language, of whatever extraction
or orientation, is expected willy-nilly to acknowledge the cultural dominance
of Cusco and accept it as the defining mark of his or her peruanidad.
By extension, then, Quechua is not just one of the estimated 44 languages
extant in Peru(3) but the true "native"
tongue of all Peruvians. If they refuse stubbornly to recognise
this, it can only be because they are ashamed of their nationality:

Logically then, Pacheco and his colleagues, faithful to " su lengua
materna", represent the true patriots. Indeed, Pacheco seems to suggest
that South Americans (Latin Americans? Americans?) in general should accept
his definition of cultural identity:

Thus the politico-cultural agenda of the Academia is defined in sharply
restricted terms; it is nothing more or less than the reduction of the
modern republic to a sphere in which the influence of the Academicians
- guardians of the true language, the true culture and history of the nation
and beyond - might be supposed to hold sway: indeed, Pacheco seems to be
in a state of constant amazement that still not everyone shares his views:

What is ostensibly a linguistic project turns out to be a nationalist
one; beyond this, what is ostensibly nationalist is in fact a self-serving
regionalist and class-based vision of the world, made in the image of the
Academia.

4 Quechua language and the discourse of Quechua superiority

The cult of admiration for the Incas is founded on a series of givens.
One is the superiority of their system and philosophy of government to
any other. If Inca society was "casi un paraíso" (Pacheco 1994:13)
then it must have been based on extraordinary principles. Hence Pacheco
lights upon a - frankly rather banal - saying attributed to Pachacútec
Inca, and invests it with enormous significance:

However, the recurring leitmotif of Inca cultural superiority
is physical: the grandeur of their building. The archaeological sites of
Incaic Cusco (and only Incaic Cusco - there is no mention of, say, Tiahuanaco,
or Chavín de Huántar, or Chan Chan) are deployed as prima
facie proof of the perfection of that civilization, without any further
explanation being considered necessary:

The continuing existence of these Incaic sites sits ill with the simultaneous
claim that the Spaniards destroyed them; but of course, the underlying
intention of the discourse is to establish not facts, but the thoroughgoing
malevolence and philistinism of the conquistadores. The "Incas"
(by which term of course we are supposed to understand the ruling class
of the Inca empire) are presented as mystically noble, spiritually perfect,
the symbolic moral antithesis of the Spaniards. This view of course owes
much too (at times is almost a mirror image of) the determinism and idealism
described for example by Pagden (1982) with regard to the view that some
Europeans had of Americans.

Within the framework of this discourse, all facets of Inca/Andean
culture (the two are never, of course, formally distinguished) are superior
to all manifestations of Spanish/European culture (again, never
formally distinguished). Whatever is Spanish is corrupted, backward, barbarous;
whatever is Incaic is, in a real sense, perfect. This must hence be true
of what in this discourse is considered inarguably a key element of Inca
culture, its language. The demonstrable multilingualism of both pre-Conquest
and contemporary Peru is roundly ignored; so, too, is the objective history
of the language. For Pacheco, the Incas, in Cusco, were the first Quechua
speakers; and the language stands as yet another unsurpassed achievement.
Pacheco details the ways in which it is superior, both structurally and
in its social significance.

The linguistic absurdity of this comparison (like that of the blithe
assertion, cited below, that Quechua is "más perfecto que el latín
y el griego") goes unexamined: indeed, it is in a real sense irrelevant.
Within the terms of the discourse of Quechua superiority, every facet of
its phonology, lexicon and morphosyntaxis, even the fact that it happens
to lack articles ("ha superado... el artículo", says Pacheco, proudly)
is simply a further proof of its innate perfection. The supposed social
discourse of the language is similarly held to be a reflection of the superior
human values of its speakers.

If English speakers, then, are vile tradespeople, and French speakers
effete courtiers, only Quechua speakers are fully seres humanos.

5 The influence of the European in the discourse of the Academia

The grand irony concealed at the heart of the discourse of the Academia
is, of course, its paradoxical and very probably unconscious embracing
of foreign, colonial and national influence in language, thought and behaviour.
The most obvious manifestation of this is the constant urge to compare,
as seen above. The foundation of this entire ideological edifice is the
glorification of the Incas: yet the Incas are never thought of or understood
in relation to contemporary or earlier Andean cultures; still less are
they thought of in objective isolation. They seem to gain shape only when
they are compared with the conquistadores. Pacheco's style of argument
rests on the use of contrast and comparison; and the point of comparison,
whether implicitly or explicitly, is almost always Europe or the United
States. Nothing can be judged on its own terms. He cannot be satisfied
with the quoting of Pachacútec's philosophy of government (see above),
but must compare it to the ancient philosophers of Europe and the East
(finding it, of course, superior). It is not enough to note that Peruvian
campesinos are apt to offer the visitor a seat and refreshment; the
inevitable comparison must follow, this time with the hispanicised world
of the cities (including Cusco!):

Again, as in the example of wasiykita risaq, the fact that the
proposition is demonstrably lacking in validity (the visitor tends to be
offered refreshment and a seat in any Peruvian household) is beside the
point. A deep-rooted sense of insecurity and inferiority is betrayed at
every step in the discourse, by the constant need to compare and contrast,
to set the whole of the Andean world in opposition to that of Europe and
the West. Most tellingly of all, Pacheco contentedly cites the interest
of a handful oftraditionally-minded foreign linguists in
Quechua as if this were the final, triumphant proof of the inherent virtues
of the language(6):

For all his determined championing of Cusco and of Peru, Pacheco still
feels, clearly, that real recognition can come only from outside. The frustration
and resentment felt by a provincial élite towards the real seat
of power, the capital, is also manifest. First the importance of Lima as
an attraction in itself is scorned - and again, the opinions of foreigners
are invoked to prove the point:

But while Lima is thus to be dismissed out of hand, it is simultaneously
the source and measure of real success and influence. Indeed, the presence
of Quechua in Lima universities (a largely illusory presence; not for nothing
does Pacheco stall after mentioning San Marcos) is spoken of with ingenuous
pride:

Where comparison is not explicit it is implicit; hence if the Quechua
language is "profundamente humano" we are given to understand that Spanish
is quite the opposite of this. As far as Pacheco is concerned, Spanish
colonialism brought nothing of any benefit to Peru. The Spaniards themselves
are condemned in the harshest terms:

And yet the influence of Spanish culture, thought and language in the
universe of the Academicians is all-pervading. That this perhaps haunts
their unconscious thoughts is suggested by the bombastic, almost hysterical
way in which it is denied. Pacheco writes:

Unable to free themselves from the constraints of the Spanish paradigm,
and often seemingly unconscious of this, the mestizo élite
are condemned to recreate it, in endless inferior variations, in the Andean
world. The model for the Academia - indeed the very notion of an
Academia - comes from the madre patria.

Itier (1992a) points out that the use of five vowels in Quechua orthography
is no more than a demonstration of the extent to which Spanish has permeated
the speech of the bilinguals of the Andes. Pacheco's stout defence of pentavocalismo
provides substantial (if quite unwitting) support for this assertion:

With his concern for social rank and proper style, his enthusiastic
adherence to the idea of decrees and laws, his shortsighted regionalism
and resentment of big-city politicians, Pacheco is almost a caricature
of the provincial petit bourgeois lawyer. And yet he affects to believe
that he is fighting to break the yoke of "colonialismo mental" and that
the Spaniards brought nothing of any lasting significance to Peru. Just
as the Academia perceives Quechua orthography through the distorting grid
of the Spanish phonological system, so does it perceive the nature of its
task through a quintessentially Hispanic mindset. The pettifogging legalism
and exaggerated respect for duly-constituted authority bequeathed by Spanish
rule are faithfully reproduced in the repeated references to laws and conventions;
there is no hint of doubt that language can and must be controlled and
regulated by decree:

The now-substantial body of experience and literature derived from bilingual
and intercultural education projects in the Andes (Hornberger 1994 is a
recent example) was never once mentioned in the course of the interview.
Educational language planning is understood to be synonymous with a single
goal: enseñanza obligatoria (of the qhapaq simi, it
goes without saying), to those who do not speak Quechua, or do not speak
a variety of it acceptable to the Academia. The millions of speakers who
have acquired Quechua as their sole or principal code without the intervention
of congressional decrees or schoolteachers are not regarded as a resource
to be carefully cultivated. Rather, as will be seen, those unfortunate
enough to have learned their mother tongue in this debased manner must
be given up as lost, for the task now is to instil the Academia's version
of the language through official channels to the young and, preferably,
middle-class.

6 Whose Quechua? The provincial élite and ideology in language

That the Academia's project is a nationalist one is beyond doubt, but
the nature of this nationalism is narrow and deterministic. The Cusco élite,
seeking to remake the model of peruanidad in its own image, finds
in the Quechua language a malleable symbol. The multilingualism and multiculturalism
of Incaic and contemporary Peru alike are ignored; Peruvian culture is
defined as nothing more than Andean culture, this in turn as nothing more
than Incaic culture, and this as the Quechua-speaking culture of Cusco.
But we are not to make the mistake of thinking that the natural guardians
of the culture and language are, then, the monolingual campesinos
of the region, for the slavish imitation of the at once despised and secretly-admired
Europeans extends too to 19th century notions of nation, language and race.

The mestizo bourgeoisie see themselves as the inheritors of Inca
glory, and the symbolism of language must be pressed into serving this
end; Niño-Murcia (1997) convincingly employs Bourdieu's concept
of symbolic power to suggest why it is that the Academia sees recognition
of the authenticity of its own sociolect as indispensable. Hence their
discourse on language starts from the assumption that the "best" Quechua
is spoken by themselves, bilingual intellectuals. René Farfán
Barrios, another leading member of the Academia, writes:

Quite so; the Academia has very little time for the monolingual native-speaker
who has learnt a living, culturally-embedded language. The dictionary project
(AMLQ 1995) is therefore of necessity a prescriptive one, for its authors
propose quite explicitly to impose their own sociolect as the standard.
As was noted above, when Pacheco is asked if the dictionary attempted to
describe the Quechua of present-day monolinguals or to set a normative
standard, he chooses to reply obliquely, describing the composition of
the Academia:

Authority rests on age, on social status, on published works, on professional
qualifications that have little to do with linguistic criteria: in the
case of Doctor Covarrubias, typically and tellingly, his authority is marked
by his having worked abroad. Certainly the miembros de número
are native speakers of Quechua, but equally certainly they are bilingual
and middle-class. The language of less-educated speakers is dismissed as
being not the stuff of serious study, not fitted for the lofty medium of
print:

What, then, is this Quechua that the Academia has the duty of defending
and promoting? As Godenzzi says, the supposed "Quechua Imperial del Cusco"
is in fact "un sociolecto... el del grupo de mestizos que se siente heredero,
no de los "indios", sino de los Incas, de los grandes y poderosos" (Godenzzi
1992:63). The Academia has at best a patronising view of the language used
by the great majority of monolingual speakers, which is seen as having
fallen away from the classical model, become coarsened and degraded, a
lingua romana rustica to the lingua latina of the Academicians:

Perhaps the most remarkable leap of logic made here is that, as campesinos
do not know how to read and write, so they do not know how to pronounce
their language correctly. This astonishing asseveration finds its echo
in the endless debate on Quechua orthography - in which connection Cerrón-Palomino
(1991) quite properly asks: for whom is the language being written? - indeed,
it is the ideological underpinning of the Academia's stance thereupon,
and explains the almost obsessive interest in written text (dictionaries,
grammars, constitutions, textbooks) rather than possibly more effective
and direct methods of language support. Again, enseñanza obligatoria
- of the Academia's written standard, naturally - is the answer. Control
over the writing implies, to Pacheco, control over the language - and hence,
we might reasonably suspect, control tout court.

The ideological stance of the Academia, then, is as much a class- or
ethnic-based one as regional or nationalist. Significantly, this disdain
for "popular" speech is projected onto other languages and cultures, and
the interlocutor is assumed to be supportive and understanding of this:

Pacheco later told me (off tape) that black people spoke "ba-ba-ba-ba".
Just as American and Peruvian blacks are considered to be past saving,
so the speech of the campesinado is considered so decayed and corrupted
that the only sensible recourse is to begin again at the level of the young
and middle-class, instilling in them a "better" Quechua, as defined by
the Academia. This ingrained racism and class superiority, itself doubtless
a compensation for the resentment and sense of inferiority felt by the
provincial mestizo bourgeoisie, has deep historical roots. Itier
(1992a) cites the regionalist Federico More, writing in 1925:

The echo of More's words some 70 years later is striking; Pacheco, too,
considers black speech to be so degenerate as to be beneath contempt, and
for all his fervent protestations that all Peruvians are cholos
- "todo peruano, nacido, todo habitante es cholo, sea rubio, sea negro,
sea chino, sea blanco, alto, lo que sea: es cholo" - one imagines that
he would have little time for the Peruvian descendants of Chinese either.

Those academic linguists and quechuistas who dare to take issue
with the Academia's stance on the language are bitterly attacked, and their
motives maligned; and so, within the framework of discourse established
by the Academia, they must be: far from indulging in objective academic
debate, they are challenging its very authority. It falls to Pacheco to
re-assert this authority, and pentavocalismo is once again the point
at issue:

The confusion of the last two propositions may give us an insight into
the fundamentally self-contradictory task that the Academia has set itself:
on the one hand, to carry out disinterested academic reasearch - "hacer
ciencia" - and on the other to propagandise - "defender una cultura". It
ends up doing neither well. The level of "scientific" accuracy demanded
by the Academia might be gleaned from a cursory reading of Pacheco's (1994)
book on Inca philosophy. This consists to a large extent of quotations
culled from secondary school textbooks and denunciations of the moral turpitude
of modern nations, leavened, as if for light relief, with the occasional
extraordinary assertion, such as that languages like Thai and - incredibly
enough - Vietnamese, use ideographic writing systems, and that the same
is true of the "bloque árabe" - in which for good measure is included
Iran (Pacheco 1994:120). The Academy's long-awaited dictionary (AMLQ 1995),
an expensively printed and produced hardback book of some 900 pages, was
described to me by a leading Peruvian linguist and quechuista as
"una porquería" and "un monumento a la ignorancia". Certainly it
is inadequate at even the most basic level: the bibliography is arranged
by alphabetic order of first names, and relatively large blocks of pages
are bound out of sequence.

The Academia, in short, is in effect a self-elected group of pseudo-scholars,
who have as their chief aim the public ratification of their own view of
themselves as the uniquely qualified spokesmen (for none of the leading
members is a woman) for a language, a culture, a region and a nation. Their
claim is based on racial and class prejudice, and rooted in their own deep-seated
sense of provincial resentment, of ethno-cultural inferiority in relation
both to the capital and to the outside world. Their politico-cultural worldview,
if their President is representative (which he seems indeed to be) is buttressed
by a mishmash of ill-digested ideological influences: a naive ahistorical
romanticism, dollops of awkwardly-fitting state socialism, casual racism,
aggressive nationalism and authoritarianism, all shot through with resentment
of the metropolitan politician class and an acute consciousness of a supposed
moral decay. It is putting it too strongly - but perhaps only slightly
too strongly - to suggest that the Academia is propounding a species of
Andean fascism, of which the Quechua language is merely a vehicle.

And yet for all its posturing in defiance of the dominance of Lima and
its expressed desire to change the cultural face of the nation, the Academia
is at root a deeply conservative body, and it is unlikely that any government
would regard it as a threat. The Academicians are not in any real sense
a counterélite (though they are certainly potentially this): rather,
they enjoy the institutional support they derive from their position as
the officially-endorsed spokesmen for the language, and are careful not
to jeopardise it. Their relationship with the state is a semi-dependent
one, and their activities reflect this. Article 4 of the 1990 decree establishing
the Academia (reproduced in AMLQ 1995) names the state as the first (and
one might suspect therefore the principal) provider of its funds. It is
hardly then surprising that, as if in return, the President of the Republic
is automatically elected as a miembro honorario protector, and that
Article 3 of the decree specifically names as one of the six fundamental
tasks of the Academia the preparation of an approved Quechua version of
the Constitution of the Republic. Resentful of the Lima-based state which
they perceive to have usurped their natural position as leaders of the
nation, the Academicians are nevertheless acutely conscious of the prestige
and authority which state legitimation affords them.

7 Conclusion

There is hence a real tension, an ambiguity in the Academia's discourse.
This ambiguity derives in part from the contradictions inherent in the
way Quechua is perceived and represented in Peru; it is simultaneously
the stigmatised language of an oppressed minority and a state-legitimated
symbol of former national glory (that is, what Fishman 1972:44 calls "the
link with the glorious past"). Any body (indeed, any individual) campaigning
for the maintenance or revitalisation of Quechua in Peru, then, does so
within a social context where language attitudes have become heavily ideologised
in sometimes contradictory ways: discourses upon Quechua tend to dwell
heavily on the notions of shame and pride, often together.

What are the implications of all this for Quechua language maintenance
efforts? My own recent (and as yet unpublished) research among migrant
communities in Lima undergoing rapid language shift suggests that the constant
identification of Quechua with the Incas, which forms the core of the Academia's
political and linguistic discourse, is - at best - effective only at the
level of reinforcing national or regional pride. In terms of attitudes
to "real" language it is negative, having the effect of demeaning the speech
of present-day monolinguals and of locking the Quechua language into an
idealised and remote past. As Niño-Murcia (1997:157) quite rightly
concludes: "The purist discourse in Cuzco, although it appears on the surface
to legitimize indigenous culture... in reality contributes to the marginalization...
of the indigenous language and ultimately of its rural speakers, whose
language one sees marked by the stigma of poverty and equated with a lack
of culture".

Genuine grass-roots aspirations for language maintenance are hence unlikely
to find an ally in the shape of the Academia. It is beyond doubt that the
Academia as presently constituted, with its roots in the bilingual Cusco
élite, would have little interest in (indeed, a decided hostility
to) any language maintenance project (whether it arose from state planning
or from grass roots aspirations) that it did not itself legitimate and
control. Perhaps the most striking point to emerge from a consideration
of the discourse of the Academia is that, quite obviously, it would be
hostile to any project which proceeded from the assumption that the language
of rural monolinguals was in itself good, whole, representative or worthy
of protection.

What is at stake in the Peruvian language maintenance debate is the
perceived "ownership" of Quechua: the authority to speak about, and on
behalf of, the language. If the principle of self-determination for linguistic
minorities is to have any real value, it is vital that the Academia's deliberate
attempt to position itself as the sole valid representative of a language,
a region and a people continue to be resisted, and its ideological agenda
to be laid bare.

1. 1That is, the Academia-approved
practice of rendering Quechua orthographically using five vowels, rather
than the three preferred by many linguists. This question has been the
cause of (or pretext for) innumerable skirmishes between the Academia and
its academic critics. Compare for example Samanez Flórez (1992)
and Itier (1992b).

2. 2Many of Degregori's
(1994) cusqueño informants thought in much the same way,
showing a marked tendency to reduce "...nuestro pasado prehispánico
a su último momento de desarrollo, el relacionado con los Incas"
(1994:448-9). Within this style of discourse, as Degregori rightly notes,
virtually nothing of any significance is attributed to pre-Inca cultures
- not even the cultivation of such ancient Andean products as maize and
tubers.

3. 3Estimate made by CILA-UNMSM
team of Inés Pozzi-Escot, Gustavo Solís and Fernando García,
and reported by Solís at I Encuentro Internacional de Peruanistas,
Universidad de Lima, 3-6 September 1996. See also Somos magazine
(El Comercio 19/10/96) pp 12-16.

4. 4Bearing in mind Pacheco's
view of himself as the authority called upon to bring order to the squabbling
family of Academicians and quechuistas, it is perhaps unsurprising
that he finds such thrilling resonance in this unspectacular pensée.

5. 5There is a faint echo
here of the popular conception of "the Incas" - however thay may be defined
- as stronger, taller and more physically impressive than today's Peruvians.
This is a common belief, perhaps reflecting the general sense of decay
and enfeeblement since the conquest; in language, in technological skill
and in government. Thus a (better than average!) street comedian in Lima's
Plaza San Martín: "Ni tamaño tienes. ¿Cómo
eran los incas? Grandotes, puro músculo. Ahora mira la huevadita
de hombre. A Túpac Amaru le quisieron descuartizar entre cuatro
caballos. Nunca pudieron. Le jalaron, el pata feliz, se reía. Aeróbicos,
decía. Ahora jalas a esta vainita con dos cuyes y lo matas." (La
República, 08/09/96. Note how Túpac Amaru II is associated
with the Incas themselves, and becomes a symbolically Incaic character
rather than a relatively modern one).

6. 6Those linguists, Peruvian
or foreign, who have taken a less indulgent view of the work of the Academia
are of course alternately reviled and ignored.

7. 71996 was nominated by
the Peruvian government "Año de los 600,000 turistas". A major international
campaign was launched to try to achieve this target: it was eventually
met.